As promised, developer Taptaptap on Thursday pushed a major refresh of its award-winning camera and photo-editing software for iOS devices, Camera+.

Now available in the App Store as a free update for existing users, Camera+ 6 for the iPhone and iPod touch takes advantage of a whole bunch of mobile photography enhancements in iOS 8, such as manual focus and exposure control, a cool extensions allowing you to edit your snaps right inside iOS 8’s stock Photos app, using native Camera+ controls and the app’s photo-editing features, to name but a few.

They’ve updated the app icon (left is old, right is new):

The biggest news, as mentioned above, is the addition of the full range of manual shooting modes and controls that give you much greater control over your iPhone photography. “For us, being first to market with manual shooting control was far less important than being the best at it,” said developers.

For starters, you can manually adjust focus and exposure as you’re snapping your photos rather than after the fact. Manual focus is pretty cool in that it allows you to go from the closest of closeup to the widest of wide angle with a flick of your finger.

I particularly love a new Macro shooting mode with ultra-sharp focus.

Manual exposure and the Exposure Compensation wheel make it easy to lighten or darken your shot. The full range of adjustable shutter speed and ISO controls is also available, including a “Shutter Priority” mode where you pick the shutter speed and ISO is automatically set for you to get the perfect exposure.

A bunch of white balance presets and the adjustable white balance control will be indispensable to set the right tones for your shooting conditions.

Taking advantage of the new App Extensions in iOS 8, Camera+ 6 can now advertise its editing controls to the operating system which makes them available in the stock Photos app.

Just tap on a photo in the Photos app, hit the Edit button and then tap the “…” icon to enable the Camera+ extension.

And last but not least, you’ll love a new and intuitive wheel control that can be rolled, flicked and swiped to let you apply various effects and filters with a much higher degree of precision than before.

Camera+ developers recently launched a new website dedicated to all things related to mobile photography, called “snap snap snap”, which you can find right here.

If you don’t own Camera+ yet, it’s a $1.99 download for the iPhone and iPo touch. The i$4.99 iPad edition of Camera+ has not received these updates (last updated: January 21).